East Austin Black History Project

The East Austin Black History Project is a community-driven multidisciplinary initiative to document and promote the rich cultural history of Central East Austin’s African American community from its beginnings in the mid-1800s to the present and beyond. The wide-ranging content of this documentation celebrates the neighborhood’s heritage through words, images and sound, including oral histories, with a cogent and exhaustive body of new research and writing, existing archival materials, and the development of new primary source materials.The vehicle to present the work of our historical research group will be a website where we will amass a collection of multimedia and narrative material. The site will be produced by the Digital Archive Project, a component of EABHP.We will look at the Central East Austin community through the following windows:

Arts, Culture and Music

Politics and Civic Engagement

Redevelopment and Gentrification

Schools and Education

Religion and Churches

Neighborhoods and Streets

Historic Sites and Architecture

Entrepreneurship and Commerce

Our group is composed of professionals and upper-division and graduate level university students with interest in and aptitude for high-quality cultural history/cultural anthropological research and writing. Others involved will include professionals and students from the various fields of information science, cultural/historic preservation, new media, film/photography, web design and architecture, and other related fields.In our research, we will collect and compile materials currently found in a number of public repositories, however we will also discover and develop new primary sources found outside of mainstream scholarly and public institutions. Further, we will develop new primary source materials and produce original writing that analyzes and reports our findings in topical narratives with historical focus.The materials from this project will appeal to the general public as well as scholars, present & future Austin residents, and cultural tourists interested in local, state and national history. The success of the project will be enhanced through strategic partnerships with local archives and historical/cultural organizations in Austin (Austin History Center, Huston-Tillotson University, Austin Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, Cultural Arts Division of Austin, French Legation Museum, etc).Because of the very nature of this work, we envision that the EABHP will be an ongoing research and publishing project that will span a number of years.